Yes, they can hear us!

During the 2016 InDesignConference in Washington DC, there was an Adobe questions and answers session on the opening night, featuring Assistant Product Manager for Adobe InDesign, Mohammad Javed Ali. During this session, the Adobe team fielded questions from attendees ranging from specific anecdotal issues to feature requests. At the beginning of the session, Mohammad revealed that there are four channels of online communication that Adobe pays specific attention to:

The Adobe InDesign forum

This self-moderated user-to-user forum is monitored by Adobe staff. Users’ questions are normally answered by other users, but occasionally are answered by the Adobe staff that are monitoring the forum.

The “wishform”

This form on the Adobe website allows users to either submit a bug report OR a feature request for future versions of any Adobe software.

Crash Reports

Whenever an Adobe application unexpectedly quits, a dialog box usually appears not long after the “crash” asking users to fill in a form to ask what happened. Don’t ignore this prompt when it inevitably appears – Adobe does pay attention to the reports.

NPS

This is information that is made available from the software itself and reports back on performance issues – unlike the other communication, it requires no intervention from the user.

They can’t be everywhere

Sites like mine and other pages I recommend in my Must see resources are great resources for InDesign. I would love to think that articles I have written have directly influenced the future direction of Adobe InDesign, but the reality is that Adobe cannot be everywhere at once to read every article not just from me, but other bloggers and sites that write about InDesign or any Adobe product.

Similarly, these sites usually feature comments or response sections for any questions, concerns or comments to be raised so that they can be addressed by the author or other readers. While some great and truly constructive conversations have resulted from forum posts on these sections, some are akin to soap-boxes for disgruntled users to vent their frustrations about the software. I make a distinction between posters who raise valid points and make attempts to seek appropriate remedies; and posters who do nothing more than pour scorn on the product.

Regardless of the kinds of post, if it is posted in a place that Adobe staff are not monitoring or unlikely to see it, then the poster is ultimately screaming into the void.

(Anti?)Social media

Similarly, Adobe maintains a presence via many social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter. That presence is not necessarily maintained by the team responsible for Adobe InDesign. The Adobe customer service team may see any issues via social media and respond to them, but may not be directly fielded by the Adobe InDesign team.

I want to be heard

Ultimately, if there is an issue that you feel the Adobe InDesign team needs to be made aware of, say it directly to them online via one of the channels mentioned at the start of the article.